This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
3GPP Third Generation Partnership Project
ANR Automatic Neighbor Relations
DL DownLink (from base station to user equipment)
DRX Discontinuous Reception
eNB or eNode B evolved Node B (LTE base station)
GBR Guaranteed Bit Rate
HetNet Heterogeneous Network
ISM Industrial, Scientific and Medical
LTE Long Term Evolution
MME Mobility Management Entity
NCE Network Control Element
QoS Quality of Service
RAT Radio Access Technology
RF Radio Frequency
Rx Receiver or reception
TS Technical Standard
Tx Transmitter or transmission
SGW Serving GateWay
SON Self-Organizing Network
UE User Equipment
UL UpLink
Current 3GPP standards define Automatic Neighbor Relations (ANR), which allows the eNB to configure a UE to retrieve information from a neighbor cell in order to configure a handover relation to that neighbor cell.
When a UE is configured to perform such measurements, the UE must go off channel on the current serving cell, resulting in a potential disruption of uplink/downlink data to the UE. This can result in QoS characteristics of the bearers established at the UE to not be met. Further, it can take over 2000 msecs (milliseconds) to retrieve neighbor cell information from an inter-RAT neighbor cell, whereas the longest packet delay budget for best effort service is only 300 msecs. The UE will be put into Discontinuous Reception (DRX) in order to give the UE enough time to obtain the information from the neighboring cell. However, if the UE has data to send, the UE can immediately send the data, causing the neighbor cell information retrieval to fail.